Daily Score Blog

Everyone knows that cars are expensive, right?  Still, it may come as a surprise to find out just how much money we spend getting from place to place.

The cost of the car itself -- typically the second biggest purchase many families make in their lives -- is just the start.  When you start adding in the cost of gasoline, and car insurance, and maintenance and repairs, and parking, and taxes to build new roads and maintain old ones, and license fees, and the medical costs of traffic accidents...boy, I could go on all day...Well, suffice it to say, the zeroes start adding up.

A while back I asked the estimable Yoram Bauman to wade through consumer spending figures to try to figure out how much we actually spend on cars in a year.  Cutting to the chase...

In the Northwest states--Washington, Oregon, and Idaho--about 19 percent of all consumer spending goes towards transportation.  A bit of that pays for planes, trains, and buses, but a whopping 95 percent pays for cars and related expenses.

Think of it this way.  Open up your wallet, or check your bank balance, or look at your last paycheck.  If you're close to average, about one-fifth of all the money you see will go to pay for your car.

Or think of it this way -- maybe you had a rough commute this morning, and spent 20 minutes in traffic.  That's frustrating.  But consider this: for the first hour and a half you spend at work, you're busy working to pay for your car.  Which means that you're spending more time "stuck in traffic" at the office than on the road.

A few days ago I took the long way home from work, biking through Seattle's Magnolia neighborhood. One of the many nice things about riding in Magnolia is the dedicated bike lane painted along the major routes. Not that cyclists need the lane: the streets have ample shoulders and the traffic is usually calm.

But there are a few places in Magnolia where a bike lane would be helpful. Near intersections, for example. Unfortunately, whenever a cyclist might actually need them, the bike lanes disappear. I mean that literally: a few dozen feet before each intersection, the striped bike lane vanishes. Then, 30 feet or so beyond the intersection, it re-appears. 

Those disappearing lanes, I realized on my ride, illustrate perfectly what's wrong with the way we treat cycling: we only provide for bikes where it's easy and doesn't really make any difference. As soon as the going gets tough, planners revert to treating bikes like pariahs, or simply ignoring them.

That sort of historical neglect was why I was thrilled to see Seattle's new master bike plan come to light. Here was a chance to make major upgrades and big, lasting improvements in the way we treat bikes. But just a few months later, I'm losing faith that things will change.